


The Arc of Conflict, Fragment e14g,2: The Unresurrected Spirit

by bzarcher, solarbird



Series: Of Gods and Monsters [89]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Acceptance, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Apologies, Computers, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Fear, Gen, Hacking, Hope, Mathematics, Misunderstandings, Omnics, Other, Redemption, Rejection, Russia, Theft, Trans Sombra | Olivia Colomar, Unexpected Visitors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 16:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19338073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bzarcher/pseuds/bzarcher, https://archiveofourown.org/users/solarbird/pseuds/solarbird
Summary: Alliances, it has been said, are at their weakest on the brink of defeat, and on the brink of victory. After defeating the China Sea omnium, the gods of Oasis offered their help to Russia, to defeat their own Siberian threat, and Russia accepted that offer -  but made additional secret plans of their own.Sometimes, being the right thief in the right place at the right time is both very important and a real pain in the ass.Of Gods and Monsters: The Arc of Conflictis a continuance ofThe Arc of Ascension,The Arc of Creation, andThe Armourer and the Living Weapon. To follow the story as it appears,please subscribe to the series.





	The Arc of Conflict, Fragment e14g,2: The Unresurrected Spirit

**Author's Note:**

> dirtyclaws has launched [a public fan-run _Of Gods and Monsters_ discord server](https://discord.gg/pDZMpVT) and invites everyone to come join it. ^_^

Alejandra grabbed at the buttons on the lift. _Numbers. Numbers. Number. C'mon. Number._

The smoke from the explosion - from the demolition, really, given the effect it had - rose fresh across the sky, visible through the windows of the Ministry tower. She didn't have permission to be here, but it didn't matter. _Number._

Adriana stirred, sluggish, slow. _Number?_

_NUMBER!_

_`sombra number` _

_NUMBER!_

_...48... 2. 48-2. 4802? 48. And 0. And 2._

Alejandra flailed at the 48th floor button, hit it, and the lift started to rise, quickly, too quickly for her to process properly, until the door opened, and Freira blinked at the opening, confused for a moment, the foremost of a whole herd of deer seeing too many headlights. Then she kicked herself forward, stumbling, looking for doors, of which there were few, and numbers, of which there were also few, but one, yes, one, she remembered, she thinks, she's been here before.

Before she could pound on it, the door slid itself open, and behind it, Sombra, still a little slow, but still so much better than even a week before, in tears, already knowing, already debriefed.

She stared at her former mentor.

"What the hell happened to you?"

"Processors," Yui snapped, her voice so distinctive for never, ever being heard. "Needmore. Processors. _Now_."

"Yui?!"

"Canttalk. _Now_."

Sombra hesitated, then tried initialising the deep link - the one Los Fantasmas had found, those weeks ago, in surgery - but found herself slapped away. "NO! NOT safe. PROCESSORS!" Yui repeated. "HELP!"

Sombra thought, hard, fast, able to again, finally, even if it still tired her - though less so every day - and her eyes widened, and her mouth opened, and for a moment, she could say nothing, until she managed, "the new harnesses, they aren't ready, we don't have a surgeon, we could..."

"External. Fine. Triple, triple, triple clock. 9242 series. Same interface. Help."

 _The old type,_ Sombra thought. _Like she has now. Just updated, faster._

"Like for modelling?"

"Yes," Yui said nodding. "Yes."

The hacker pulled her onetime mentor into her apartment, half-dragging her across the floor, and got her to the couch. "Wait here," she said, before ducking out, over, into her extensive workspace, built to her specifications but not yet really used.

"Athena! You're listening in, I know it!"

"I am."

"Do I have these? Did they get shipped?!"

"Yes. But I do not have locations. I'm sorry."

Rummaging through unpacked boxes, the goddess of hacking found one that looked right, and opened it. _Coasters?!_ She threw the boxes aside, and swore at the movers, before thinking... _no, that's not fair_ , she thought. _I was still in hospital. C'mon, come **on** , where are they?! They'd better not..._

"aH HA HA!" she shouted, finding a box of very similar size, and opening it. A set of three, 9242, the now-standard high speed versions, and pulled out her personal test harness, the old one, hoping it was still close enough to Los Fantasmas's spec.

 _No time for gentle_ , she thought, and slammed the processors out of their packaging and into the harness's sockets. _No time for..._

She shook her head at herself.

 _No,_ she thought. _Not for this. This we can't shortcut._ She plugged in the harness and started a test sequence. _Heh, listen to me. "We." They're back in my life for a week and..._

She shook her head, again. _No,_ she thought. _I know what they're like. I'm me, and just me, and that's all there is to it._ And as the processor test and initialisation ran towards completion, she actually believed it.

"Do you think," Athena said, quietly. "Did she get..."

"I sure hope so, amiga," Sombra replied, just as quietly. "I sure hope so."

The test completed, functionality - at least at basic levels - good, and that was good enough. Picking up the harness, she ran back into the living room, grabbing an interface box on the way out the door. _2PB/sec should be enough_ , she thought. _The chips only have a terabyte onboard... fuck, storage..._ She hopped back a step and grabbed a rather large - if not necessarily fast - storage brick, as well.

Los Fantasmas lay on the couch, immobile, blinking with an exact regularity, in maintenance mode, all hands specifically off-deck, waiting.

"I'm here, babe," she said, as she touched the physical access on one of Yui's cores, and found it unlocked. "Here y'go."

She linked the two systems, and got out of the way, watching light running across circuits, bright, fast, a flashy set of signals for diagnostics, and data, showing - amongst other things - that at least the interfaces could link.

Five minutes later, the lights dimmed, Los Fantasmas's blinking broke its rhythm, and Freira looked out, and up, and smiled. "Thank you."

"Was..."

Sombra swallowed, looking at the light pattern on the new processors.

"...was that what I hope it was?"

"No," Freira said, sadly. "Well... a little. Some. Something important."

"What the hell were you doing?"

"Getting into what we're not supposed to get into, dummy, what do you think?"

Sombra laughed, wiping the last of a tear away.

"Some," she said, prompting.

"A little," Freira repeated.

"What?"

"Not who he was. Not... all of him, not even close. But..."

Freira thought about it for a moment, trying to characterise the intersection of state, of surface - it was hard even to call it thought, and it was difficult to compare even to an omnic mind, much less a human's, or a goddess's. "Koschei... was never supposed to be self-aware. None of them were. It's why they weren't going to be slaves. But he was. In a way. I think they all were."

"You're sure?"

Adriana smirked. "Within 0.33 percentile."

Suddenly, Sombra understood, an electric feeling across her skin, and she swallowed, hard. "You mean... you got that? You got that, that code?"

"More like that state," Freira said, "but yeah - code's part of it. I got what made him... _him_."

"Then if - _when_ \- we can rebuild a new version of him," Sombra said, excited, "if we can _apply_ it, and it _works..._ "

" _That's_ when we'll know we really got him back."

A few hours later, they'd managed to stabilise the statebase into external processors, get them connected to more storage, and frozen the runstate into place, preserved, for the future.

"It won't be him," Adriana repeated, this time, to Athena.

"No," Athena agreed, "but it will be a _part_ of him. And so will what we build. And that is..."

300 milliseconds.

"That is better than I'd hoped."

"You hope, amiga?" Sombra asked the one free AI.

"It's all I've ever done."

\-----

"Adriana," Sombra said, later, after some flor de Jamaica with her former mentor, and some of those biscuits Lena liked so much. "I..."

She sighed.

"I've got to say something."

Adriana took a sip from her cup of the herbal tea, and tilted her head, waiting.

"I'm sorry. For all of it. Back then."

"We know." Los Fantasmas replied, all of them paying a good deal of attention. "You told us, already."

"I did? I thought I did, but... I wasn't sure if that was real."

"It was. You did. In the operating room. We know."

"With all the noise in my head from the software damage... I don't always remember things from that state real well anyway. _Particularly_ not with that many meds in my system."

"I'm not surprised." The collective put down their tea, and grimaced, a little. "Not by that, anyway. So what the hell? It took getting nuked to make you apologize? Or is this payback for helping out?"

“No! It's not! I'm not... I guess I deserved that."

"More than a little, yeah."

Sombra nodded, accepting the criticism as fair. "I really - I've wanted to find you, and _apologise_ to you, for a long time. Look... I'm really sorry, all right? For real."

"Okay, then. Why?"

An expression Los Fantasmas had never seen cross the hacker's face crossed it, clearly, as the hacker looked down at her plate of crumbs.

"I got scared."

"You? _You_ got scared."

"Of you."

Sombra glanced up, and winced at Los Fantasmas's carefully blank look, and the expression the collective hadn't been able to identify became clearer.

 _Shame_ , Galena said, inside. _She's... **ashamed** of this._

"I had some..." Sombra leaned back and ran her hands through her hair, messing it up herself, a little, for once.

"I'd... I'd read all these books. Learning English, when I was a kid. From my grandmother, back before she was killed, you know? At her house."

She shifted nervously in her seat.

"And she had all these books, and _movies_ , some of 'em a hundred years old, like _Psycho_ ,"

Los Fantasmas flinched.

"...and _Split_..."

Los Fantasmas kept her silence, but her expression grew angry, and Sombra couldn't meet her eyes any more, and stared down at the plate in front of her.

"...and a lot of 'em - hell, probably all of 'em - were pretty terrible, even I could tell that, and maybe, maybe I should've realised they were _all_ pretty terrible? But what did I know, I was six, you know? Or seven, maybe."

The collective kept their silence, and listened.

"And... I kind of absorbed a lot of things... I really shouldn't have."

"Got that fuckin' right." Alejandra's voice. Flat.

"I know! I know! I'm _sorry_. And I learned better. I swear, I did."

"Meeting us wasn't enough? Being _in each others' heads_ wasn't enough?" Freira asked, a little anger slipping in.

"It was! But it took time, it took... too much time. It took me figuring this shit out. And I _did_ figure it out. I swear!"

"And that's why you left?" Adriana said, voice dry, like ash.

"No. I almost did. But I _got_ there. Back then. And stayed. I figured out that... wasn't _you_."

"So..." Freira asked, "then why'd you go?"

"We got too close."

Galena looked at her one time protogé, confused. "Too _close?_ We weren't ever involved. Not seriously."

"Not romantically," Sombra said, managing to glance back up. "Conceptually."

The anger they'd felt dissipated, buffeted away by their confusion over what Sombra was saying. "We... have no idea what you're talking about."

"I started to think maybe..." She shook her head, looking more ashamed than ever. "I'm sorry. It's stupid. _I_ was stupid."

A moment passed. And then, another.

"I started to think... maybe I was just..."

She put her head in her hands, fingers covering her face.

"I started to think maybe I was... another part of _you_."

Five people blinked in unison. "...one of... us, as in... part of _ourselves?!_ "

"In another body. Somehow."

Los Fantasmas started to shake a little, mouth quivering, eyes starting to water, before she exploded in laughter, rocking to and fro in her chair.

"SERIOUSLY!?" they managed, around the laughing.

Sombra looked a little like she was going to cry.

"I _said_ it was stupid."

"Oh, hon," Freira managed, still chuckling, reaching out with the tone of her words. "You know that's impossible, right?"

"I do _now_. I was new then. And stupid. And so I ran. I had to make sure... I was... agh, real is the wrong word. Me. I had to make sure I was me." Her shoulders slumped, and she sniffed. "It was stupid, and I'm sorry, and I swear, please, believe me, I'm not making this up!"

"Oh, we believe you," Freira managed, still huffing a little. "It's _much_ too stupid to make up." She leaned back in her chair, the others metaphorically shaking their individual metaphorical heads, and stepping back a little, as well. "But... wow, we're going to be giggling about this for _weeks_. And we're _never_ going to let you forget it."

"I wouldn't either," Sombra said, knowing it was true. "But... can you... forgive me?"

Freira waited for everyone else to weigh in. Yui was still laughing her head off, but waved, sure, go ahead. Alejandra, well - it wasn't a threat anymore, so she didn't mind, not really. Galena kept it as a token to be used, maybe, in negotiation later, and felt pretty certain this would help them come ahead in any deals. So, sure.

And Adriana...

Adriana was reminded of the imagination that had endeared the young girl to her when she showed up with far too much talent and a great deal of immediate need at their doorstop, not all that many years before. _Damn me_ , she said, inside. _Go ahead._

"Yeah," Freira said, reaching across the table, and patting the younger woman's head. "We can."

**Author's Note:**

> This is the eighteenth instalment of _Of Gods and Monsters: The Arc of Conflict_. To follow the story, [subscribe to the series via this link](https://archiveofourown.org/series/972024), rather than to the individual works.


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